


Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

by Donna_Immaculata, ElDiablito_SF



Series: The Fabulous Adventures in Immortality of the Vampire Aramis and the Man Who Named the Mountain, Volume III [5]
Category: DUMAS Alexandre - Works, Les Trois Mousquetaires | The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas, d'Artagnan Romances (Three Musketeers Series) - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Greek Mythology, Alternate Universe - Vampire, Anal Sex, Blood Drinking, Blow Jobs, Crossdressing, Explicit Sexual Content, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Missing Scene, Orgasm Delay/Denial, Seasickness, True Love, Twenty Years After
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-16
Updated: 2015-11-16
Packaged: 2018-05-01 10:39:32
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 9,898
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5202764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Donna_Immaculata/pseuds/Donna_Immaculata, https://archiveofourown.org/users/ElDiablito_SF/pseuds/ElDiablito_SF
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A king's life in danger. A queen in need of help. Our heroes embark on a dangerous mission to England, pursued by Evil Mordaunt and his vengeful heart and sword.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Voyage

**Author's Note:**

> This is what happened. We are sure of it.

**La Manche, June 1648**

The ship. Inside the hull, the waves lulled us into each other’s bodies. The slide of skin against skin, skin as salty as the ocean itself, salty from sweat, from too much friction. His mouth pressed to the ligaments of my neck, not drawing blood, just tasting. Holding me, burrowing into me. 

“Aramis…”

My lips pressed against his earlobe. My arms entwined around him, holding him to me, holding him tight, until I feared I may suffocate him with my body. The sea, his enemy, was merciless. My mouth pried his open, my lower lip catching on the tip of his fangs, drawing blood. The taste of my blood, mingled with the taste of my tears.

“Why are you crying?”

His breath on my face, his fingers drawing over the curves of the bones of my skull. Memento mori.

“I’ve missed you.”

“You asshole.”

Drawing me closer. His lips, _his lips_ , his fangs, seeking, seeking permission, seeking comfort, biting.

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s all right.”

“Is it?” 

“It will be.”

The English Channel. La Manche. Lord Winter enjoying the privacy of his own cabin. Where were we going? What were we going to do when we got there? I vaguely remembered the man on the cliff, the barrel of the musket that I stood in front of. And Aramis, exasperated with me again, falling into my arms as soon as we reached the cabin below deck. 

“We should have sacrificed a horse,” he joked. 

A curl of his hair entwined around my finger. His knee pried into the space between my own knees. His fingers clutching at the jut of my hip, as if by my bone to somehow steer the ship safely to shore.

“I love you.”

“I love you, too.”

England ahead of us, twenty years behind us - of what? They felt like a dream. England. I didn’t believe it. I never thought I would go back to it.

“You’re so beautiful.”

“Hold me.”

“Always.”

His body beneath mine, head tossing to and fro, eyes shut.

“The sea. Always the sea,” he moaned into my opened mouth. “Will I never escape this misery?”

I pressed soft kisses to his perspiring brow, to his temples, my fingers combed through his hair, ruthlessly messing up the curls he must’ve spent so long arranging into the perfect coiffure. 

“Poor chyortik,” my lips placing kisses into the hollow of his neck, trailing in between his collarbones. “So at the mercy of the elements.”

He whimpered, body arching into mine, nails digging into the flesh of my ass. 

“Perhaps there is something I can do to distract you,” I smiled into his skin. The cot upon which we both lay craned side to side in the waves and I moved my mouth down his body over the trail that was well-loved and well-trodden in the past.

“Athos! Oh _God_ ,” his fingers in my hair, clutching as my mouth slid over his hard, slick flesh. I relished the taste of it, the velvety feel of the leaking tip, the silky slide of the loose skin, the heaviness of him against my tongue. How had I lived all these years without this? It seemed inconceivable. Absurd.

I relinquished control for a while, letting him fuck into my throat, using my newly acquired mindfulness to take in his scent, his taste, the feel of his increasingly erratic thrusts into me, the grip of his fingers turning from fevered to tender as he pressed them into my skull.

“Ah! Oh… Great God in Heaven… _your mouth_!” I almost laughed but concentrated on licking and sucking him down. “I missed your mouth most…” he sighed and grasped blindly for my hand, entwining our fingers.

I stretched out my arm towards his face, my wrist pressed against his teeth. I paused, watching him, watching the way he drew his tongue over my pulse point, the way his nostrils flared to take in the aroma of the hidden veins and his eyes grew even darker with desire.

“You didn’t miss my blood most?” I asked through lips swollen from pleasuring him.

A whimper, a moan. I drew the flat of my tongue over his swollen cock, tasting the tension, the anticipation in it.

“I would give it up forever, if it meant I got to keep your love.” His words washed over me like the ocean and I pressed my wrist against his dropped fangs.

“Don’t,” I said. “I don’t want you to.”

I drank him in again as he drank me in, my limbs heavy and sated even though neither one of us had touched my cock. Happiness, all consuming, all powerful, running through my veins instead of blood. Celestial light, suffusing everything. His chest beneath my head, rising and falling with breaths that seemed to even out with each stroke of my hand along his flank. His heart beating to the rhythm of my own. A call to arms. 

The sea underneath us lulled us to sleep. Poseidon below. My Father on Olympus above. Ahead of us: England. Why?


	2. The Intruder

**London, July 1648**

I stood by the window, looking out into the dark alleyway and attempting to catch a whiff of cool air that wafted from the river. The fluvial breeze fought valiantly against the stagnant miasma that plugged the narrow lanes and courts between the houses like cork plugs a bottle of wine. Athos was asleep, arms and legs thrown wide open, and his skin and hair were damp with sweat. The summer heat pressed down on the city. Our room in the Bedford Tavern, where we had taken lodging for the duration of our stay in London, resembled a bread oven. Lord de Winter, who had recommended the place to us, had not stayed here himself. I frowned and tried to remember when I had last seen our English friend. He was supposed to take us to join the king’s army, and yet, we had been in London for several weeks without receiving any summons from his lordship.

On the bed, Athos stirred. He turned his head, and silver light that poured in from the window threw his profile into sharp relief. His dark lashes trembled as he chased images that Morpheus sent upon him in his dreams. My heart fluttered against my ribs, and warmth swirled through my breast and dissipated in my blood while I traced the lines of his body with my eyes. All those centuries, and his beauty still took my breath away. The inside of his arm, the muscles soft and relaxed; the crook of his elbow still bearing traces of blood where I had drunk from him; the upturned, open hand. Auntie Selene planted a kiss into the centre of his palm and his long fingers trembled.

The summer heat pressed down on me and rendered me languid and sluggish. How many days had I spent lying in Athos’ arms, sweltering, steaming, screwing myself slowly into him, shaking in his arms when he spent himself inside me? We had not left our room for days, for there was nothing out there. ‘The Globe’, Athos had told me, while we made our way to London. ‘I will take you to the Globe.’ It wasn’t until we’d arrived in the city that we learned that Cromwell had banned theatre and that there was no entertainment to be found. How different must London have been when Athos was stranded here thirty years ago. How different when Marie was guest at Hampton Court twenty years ago (and shocked the Puritans and the French ambassador by swimming across the Thames, the mischievous nymph).

Shadows shivered in the hollow of Athos’ throat, in the crook of his neck. Darkness pooled under the curve of his ribs and in the dips beneath his hipbones. A beautiful statue, more perfect than the marble eromenos in his garden, for his skin was velvety soft and animated by hot blood that even now regenerated in his veins and pumped life through his muscles.

An Anemos blew in a kiss through the window and I caught it with a greedy, open-mouthed inhale. The coldest hour of the night was upon us, just before Aurora’s first blush was about to appear in the eastern sky. But even the coldest hour was still too hot. Athos would sink into fitful slumber every now and then, exhausted from heat, from blood loss and from the constant, breathless, helpless fucking that filled our waking hours. I would sleep next to him, glued to his skin and reverberating with the thud of his blood.

In the darkness of the street, something moved. A shadow, the creak of leather as shoes slipped over cobblestones, the glint of steel. A shadow more than a man, as it glided along the wall and merged with its brother shadows there. The flutter of wings, the accusing angel that had followed us from the forest of Armentières, from the jetty in Boulogne, into the maze that was the heart of London. Athos had stopped me from killing him, and he had been wrong. That young man in whose veins flowed the blood of Milady was a predatory creature, one that had taken up Athos’ scent.

I glided to the heap of clothes and slipped my shirt over my head. I had moved soundlessly, yet Athos stirred and then – his voice, throaty with sleep: “Aramis?”

“Shh…” I pulled on my boots, for I had heard a creak in the staircase.

Athos sat up and swung his legs off the bed. I held up my hand, palm outwards, and he nodded and moved across the room without making any noise. He, too, slipped into his shirt and boots and handed me my sword. I opened the latch, pulled the door open a fraction, and we waited for the sound of footsteps, taking long, calm breaths to quieten our blood.

There was a creak of wood, a bang, a muffled cry as someone swore: a French voice, a familiar voice, the beautiful, refined vowels of a man born and bred in the Touraine. The door next to ours opened and Grimaud’s harassed tones tore through the night. “Blaisois, be quiet, you scoundrel!” A pause. “You’re pissed,” Grimaud said in a tone of utter disgust.

I turned my head and saw Athos’ face very close to mine. “Blaisois?” he mouthed. I shrugged. The groom whom Athos had so generously lent to me for our trip to England (probably because we all knew that Grimaud would have refused to valet me) was a dim-witted youth, who would not go scampering around London in the dead of night on his own initiative. He must have been sent out on some errand or other and got waylaid in an inn.

“Grimaud!” I mouthed back at Athos and passed my hand in front of my throat in a slicing motion.

Next door, a frantic whispered discussion ensued, accompanied by the sound of slapping as Grimaud chastised the youth for incompetence, inebriation and, possibly, impertinence.

Beside me, Athos pushed the door shut again and closed the latch. “What was that all about?” he asked with a smirk.

I shook my head helplessly. “I thought it was _him_ , Athos.”

Athos raised his eyebrows. “Did you think _he_ would find us?”

“He will.” I sighed and leaned against the wall with my shoulder. “He is going to find us, you know that, don’t you?”

“Fatality,” Athos whispered, ever the pagan scion of the Dodekatheon. “We killed his mother, fate will lead him to us.”

“I wish I had shot him.” I lifted my hand to his face and cupped his cheek. “I wish you hadn’t been so bloody noble.”

“ _With all my wisdom, such mercy yet will prove supernal folly_ , is that it, Aramis?” He smiled, quoting the words back at me with which I had reproached him after he had stopped me from shooting Mordaunt.

“You did listen to me then.”

“Of course I listened to you. And I believe you were right, and I was wrong. You should have shot him.”

“Oh, shut up, you _ass_!” I ground my teeth in frustration. “The memory pains me still. It’s almost enough to make me weep.”

“You never cry.”

“No. I don’t.”

“So cold, Aramis,” he whispered hypnotically, bracing himself with a hand against the wall behind my head. “How is your heart so cold, even if your blood is hot?”

Those dark eyes, ebony-black in the twilight of our room. His mouth, curved in the familiar mocking smile. His shirt gaped open over his chest and then, further down: the bare skin of his thighs above the tops of his boots. I smirked.

“Like what you see?” Athos murmured filthily, and my cock swelled beneath the hem of my shirt.

“Those heels make your legs look great.” I put my hand on his thigh and kneaded the taut muscle.

Athos hissed and arched into me. “You should always dress like this for combat,” I continued, dragging my fingers up his thigh, scratching his skin with my nails, until my hand bumped into the swell of his arse. “You wouldn’t lose one single fight.”

“I never lose a fight anyway,” he said, spreading his legs and arching his back. I grabbed his arse and dug my fingers into the firm flesh, pulling him open. I watched his face change, his lips parted around a gasp, and the fabric of his shirt fluttered as his prick stiffened beneath it.

Athos reached down to palm himself through the thin cambric. The back of his hand brushed against my cock and I thrust my hips into the friction, pulling him in at the same time. Athos sank against me, mouth open and hot on mine, sucking my lips, my tongue, stoking the heat that simmered in my abdomen, all-consuming and unquenchable.

“Those heels are very flattering for your legs, too, sweet chyortik,” he muttered, probing the flesh between my thighs. “So firm. Almost as firm as-” His hand closed around my cock and I moaned. “Mmh, yes,” he was laughing softly against my lips. “So hard. Always so hard for me.”

I laughed and slipped out of his grip, ducked out of the circle of his arms, catching him off guard so that he ended up face-first against the wall. My hand closed around his hip, the other on top of his spine and I held him in place, thrusting my cock between his legs from behind. “Let me see,” I whispered into the back of his neck. “Hitch up your shirt for me.”

Athos groaned and clenched his fist, intent on disobeying me. I pressed myself into his back and bit the ridge of his jaw. “Let me see.” A thrust of my hips elicited another groan from him. “ _I wish it._ ”

“Oh, fuck!” He moaned, and his fingers slackened and then flexed again. He began to pull his shirt up, exposing his arse to me: its muscles so hard, yet its shape so softly curved, tautening and relaxing as he arched his back into a graceful bow.

I dipped my thumb into his cleft and spread him for me. He was still soft and pliant from when I’d fucked him before, and my digit slipped in easily. I was hard enough to impale him just like that, but instead, I pushed two fingers of my other hand into his mouth. “Suck.”

My fingers were slick when I pushed them inside him, feeling the muscles of his thighs tremble around my hand. “Is this all right?” I murmured into his ear. “Or do you need something more?”

“Your dick,” he ground out through gritted teeth. “Heaven- Hades’… _balls_. Aramis!”

“Not ‘Hera’s cunt’ then?” I rested my teeth gently against the ligaments of his neck, tasting the salt of sweat and the sweetness of _ichor pure_.

“Do not mention my stepmother’s cunt,” he growled, sliding slowly onto my cock. “Unless. You. Want. To. Spoil the mood.”

I groaned, fully sheathed in my lover’s arse and already overwhelmed by the heat of his body, the smell, the taste of him. The ripple of his muscles under my hands. I pushed his shirt up and trailed my palm along the small of his back, where sweat was gathering. Athos grabbed the doorframe, pulled away and pushed back, impaling himself on my cock.

“Like that?” I gasped into his hair. My hands closed around his hips again, I withdrew and thrust in, slamming him into the wall. Athos cried out and I grabbed a fistful of his hair. “Get yourself off!” I fucked him hard and fast, driving into his body with vicious abandon, dizzy with heat, with friction, with lack of air. With love. “I love you,” I panted. The only coherent thought left as my body lost itself in the animal act of the fuck. “ _I love you, I love you._ ”

“Gods, Aramis-” He was so close, his body clamping down on me as he thundered towards his release. I bit into the rock-hard muscle of his shoulder, the stretch of bare skin where his shirt collar had ridden down, hard enough to bruise, not hard enough to draw blood. Another breathless shove, and his body was convulsing around me, against me, as it sucked my climax out of me.

How did we make it back to the bed? We must have staggered across the room, for I found myself sprawled in the sheets, and Athos was fumbling for a bottle on the floor by the bed. He lifted it to his lips, drank, and then poured its contents over my mouth and my face. “Water,” he gasped. “Drink, Aramis. You can’t live on blood alone.”

“On yours I could,” I choked out, pulling him down into a kiss. His lips throbbed beneath mine, the blood I so loved pumped under the thin membrane of skin.

“My beautiful demon,” he sighed, as he sank down and pressed his forehead to my temple and his lips to my cheek. “One day, you will consume me.”

“Never.” Water drops on my face, running down my jaw and my throat in rivulets, cooling my heated skin. “You are inexhaustible.” I pressed my thigh into his groin. “In every respect.”

Athos’ soft laugh made me shiver as he exhaled against my wet skin. “Let me catch my breath and I shall service you again,” he promised.

Between us, slick heat was gluing us together again. My skin itched where the hairs on his chest, his arms and legs stuck to me. It would hurt to peel ourselves off each other, for we were both over-sensitised and sore. “You would service me best if you stopped being so bloody hot,” I complained, weaving my fingers through his hair. “You’re like a furnace. Worse than Porthos’ ball of sunshine.”

“Mmmh…” he murmured sleepily as his body grew heavier against my side. “And you have revitalised me like Helios will revitalise his son.”

“You truly are the best of men, count,” I whispered against his forehead. “You make me want to be a better man.”

“You are perfect already.”

I smiled. “Sleep.”

Athos’ hot lips mouthing at my collarbone, and then he floated away, into a realm where I could not follow. I let myself drift likewise, lulled by the listless flow of his blood that was like becalmed sea after a gale. My mind was at peace as much as my body, and one conscious thought remained only as I let go of everything but him: _Mine_.


	3. Marathon

**London, August 1648**

Our arms blindly grasping for each other; mouths hungry to consume the other’s taste; blood – mine, his, blood of the sacrament – boiling under our skins as we rubbed against each other, supine, erect, prostrate.

I had Aramis bent over the edge of our bed, my hands wrapped under his armpits, pushing him over my cock with each shove, each pull. I slammed my hips into him; soft, fucked-out moans muffled by the sodden mattress.

Straddling my lap in a chair that creaked beneath our combined weight, my mouth pressed to his swollen nipple. Berry red and ready to burst, just like his cock. His neck bore the traces of my teeth, like a burgundy-tinted collar over his pale skin. He arched, he moaned, he came.

Again and again. I lost count of the times.

Using the wall as a buttress, his legs wrapped around my lower back, my emissions dribbling out of his stretched hole even as I fucked into him. Again. More, deeper, faster, rutting against each other like dogs in heat, as if I had knotted in him and couldn’t let him go.

His limbs grew weaker, even as his cries got louder.

His nails, like talons of a mythical bird, scraping over my overheated flesh. My back crisscrossed in red, as if marked by the lash of the flagrum.

“Don’t stop.”

“I won’t ever stop.”

Watching him sink down onto his knees, one hand pressing down on the teeth of his lower jaw, opening his mouth, as my other hand guided my cock down his throat, the moans he elicited around my swollen cock only making me swell more. His fingers digging into the flesh of my ass, pushing me deeper inside his mouth, insatiable and untamed creature of the night. Eyelashes fluttering closed as his tongue lapped up my seed.

“Kiss me.”

“Like this?”

“Don’t go…”

“I’m not done with you yet.”

Sprawled on his back in the bed underneath me, thighs fallen open to the sides, muscles growing heavier and more lax, the beautiful V of his groin drawing my eyes to his cock which appeared to gather its last strength for one final sally. Inside him again, _still_ inside him, determined to wring that last, dry orgasm from him.

His eyes rolling back into his skull, neck curved, presenting all of its serpentine glory to me, I kissed that curve with the same reverence with which others kissed the feet of saints. 

“My beautiful boy, I’m going to wear you out yet.”

Nails slipping down my spine, arms weakening. He whimpered and moaned helplessly with each thrust.

“Don’t stop.”

“Never.”

“Don’t let go…”

“Aramis…”

Poor chyortik, his cock twitched with the pleasure-pain of dry throes of ecstasy. I had wrung him out whole, and there was nothing left to take except the secret pleasure of his sleep. He lay used and swollen beneath me and I kissed his eyelids as they shut. Unconscious at last.

I stayed inside him, my cock finally going soft after what felt like a century. I fancied myself some kind of Phidippides of the fuck, about to collapse in death, crowned with eternal glory. Stuck to me with sweat-soaked skin and hair, the Wallachian demon slept in my arms. His breath deep and even, a soft smile hidden in the corner of his kiss-swollen mouth. He slept in my arms all night, and never once awoke screaming from the terrors of his death-mares.


	4. Poetry

**London, September 1648**

I twirled the quill in my hand and tickled Aramis’ jaw with it as he leaned over my shoulder and attempted to see what I had been working on. He had suspected me of writing a follow on letter to the one we had written together to Porthos and d’Artagnan. Or rather, the letter that he dictated to me from under the writing desk and between my thighs as I scribbled mindlessly. 

_Aramis and I are very unhappy_ , I remember laughing at that one most while his lips wrapped around my cock. _Think often of Raoul._ I broke out into a fit of laughter at the very remembrance of that.

“Why did you tell me to write to them to think often of my parrot?” I had asked him when he had finished me off.

“Because I wanted to see if you’d actually do it,” the spawn of Hell replied and kissed me with his mouth full of my own taste. “Clearly, I was very persuasive,” he smirked complacently and added his own postscript to the missive. It enjoined our friends to murder Mordaunt at first opportunity.

But, as it happened at the precise moment I am recounting, I had not been working on a letter at all, and I shooed him away with the quill feather as he tried to nibble on my earlobes, lips and teeth gently tugging on the sensitive flesh.

“You can’t peek. It interferes with the creative process,” I chided him. His lips traveled down the column of my neck and settled over my shoulder.

“Oh, please. Your odes in praise of my delectable nature do not require your full concentration.”

“You do me a great injustice, Aramis,” I chuckled. “These are masterpieces that will be acclaimed by the public long after you and I are presumed dead. Just like the writing of Catullus.” 

“Surely, I’m prettier than Catullus’ Lesbia,” he tried to reach for the parchment but I batted his hand away.

“Infinitely prettier and more inspirational by far.”

“You mean this will one day be a classic?” He straightened out into a dramatic pose and recited from memory.

_Little chyortik likes to lick_  
_Up and down on my fat dick._  
_And I think it’s only right_  
_That he do this every night._

“It makes up in follow through what it lacks in poetic merit,” I smirked and pulled him into my lap. He wasted no time in picking up the piece of parchment I had been scribbling on. “Well, little chyortik? The night is young and you are eternally so.” My hand snuck between his legs and squeezed, not at all surprised to find him hard for me.

“This is extraordinary,” he pronounced, brandishing the parchment before my face. “You’ve outdone yourself this time, old man.”

I had drawn his cock, to scale, across the page and have embedded the poem over the length of his sketched out shaft. I have to say, it was quite inspired.

_Little chyortik's creamy skin_  
_Irresistible like sin_  
_Tastes like heaven in my mouth_  
_As it slowly travels south._

“It’s _almost_ beautiful,” the diabolical fiend in my lap declared and assaulted my earlobe with his tenacious teeth. “Do you think your Raoul Segundo could be induced to learn and recite it?”

“Incorporating the parrot into our love game, Aramis?” I rolled my thumb over the head of his cock through his breeches and felt it give a jovial jolt in my hand. His tongue flicked over the shell of my ear and his breath quickened. “What’s next? Will you take to embracing Grimaud?”

He laughed quietly into the side of my neck. “Perhaps that isn’t a bad idea. You could call Grimaud in and try to get _him_ to recite this to me. His delivery would be nonpareil, I would imagine, worthy of your Globe, which M. Cromwell deprives us of the pleasure of attending.”

I swung his leg over, so that he straddled my lap, and he wrapped his arms around my neck, pressing our foreheads together.

“You’ve interrupted the poetic flow,” I shook my head in mock disappointment. “Now you must propitiate the Muse.”

“Which Muse?” he nuzzled into my neck.

“Erato, of course.”

“Is she, perchance, also your sister?”

“All the Mousai are my sisters,” I replied wrapping my fingers around his heated flesh and twisting my wrist. I watched Aramis throw his head back and arch into my touch and I pressed my lips against the agile column of his neck and sucked a fleeting bruise into his skin. It would not blossom there for very long, but I did not need to mark him on the outside to know that he was mine.

“Why couldn’t you fuck one of _them_ instead of the Goddess of Discord?” he mumbled, thrusting into my fist.

I frowned and pressed him down into my lap, my own cock rubbing against the groove between his thighs. I had no desire to think of Eris at that moment. I moved my hand over his length faster, holding him closer, allowing the scent of his arousal penetrate all my senses.

“They weren’t my type, I suppose.”

“Oh, but I am?”

_Little chyortik in the night_  
_Flashes fangs ready to bite._  
_Drinks my blood so sweet and thick_  
_Bouncing gaily on my dick._

“Yes, oh _Gods_ , yes.”

“Athos!”

“Shhh, I’ve got you. It’s all right.”


	5. Feast

**London, October 1648**

In Paris, the Fronde had been in full and glorious swing for two months. Reports trickled in occasionally that spoke of riots and of citizens rallying behind princesses and princes of blood. Anne-Geneviève was at the forefront of it, and Marie, too, had thrown herself enthusiastically into many a mêlée. But none of that mattered, for Athos’ body lay spread-eagled in the sheets. Where his mind and soul were, I couldn’t tell, for he appeared to be adrift on celestial planes. His body had been reduced to a mass of nerves, viscous and tense at once. I lifted my mouth from where it was clamped to his skin and brushed my lips over his. A gasp, a whimper, as his beautiful mouth opened for my kisses. “Not yet,” I murmured, pulling back even as his tongue flicked out in an attempt to chase mine. “Wait for it.” I pressed an open-mouthed kiss to his jaw and he gasped. “ _Saepe vinces patientia, quae non viceris impetus,_ ” I reminded him gently of the fact that more was won with patience than with force.

“ _Patientia saepius laesa fit furor,_ ” Athos shot back. “And you would not like to incur my fury, little chyortik, would you?” His last words trailed off in a helpless whimper, for I trailed my hand up his flank and moulded my palm against his armpit. “Fuck!” He gasped helplessly.

“So filthy, Monsieur le comte,” I breathed into the soft hollow of his throat. “Is the rest of you as filthy as your mouth, I wonder?” I licked a long path down his sternum and dipped the tip of my tongue into the narrow groove beneath his breastbone, to feel the muscles of his stomach tauten and vibrate under the touch. “I believe you are in need of thorough grooming,” I told my idol, as I dragged my tongue wetly along the arch of his ribs. “Now, where was I?” I exhaled a warm puff of breath against his skin and continued the tongue bath down his body.

Athos writhed against his restraints. “Aramis!” he spat out. “Stop.”

“Not yet,” I purred as I moved down, nibbling at the firm muscle cord that led down his side to his groin.

“What are you doing?” Athos whispered.

I raised my head and looked up at him, his face half-hidden by the blindfold; his glistening mouth; the tendons of his neck taut like harpsichord strings. “Can’t you feel it?” Kneeling between his wide-spread thighs, I cupped his hips with my hands without touching him, letting him feel the heat that radiated from my palms and filled the space between us. Goosebumps rose on his stomach and prickled up his chest and down to his groin. His cock twitched and I leaned in and breathed a hot puff of air against its heated skin and swollen flesh.

“Please,” Athos panted, arching off the bed, desperate in his need, but I pulled back.

“Not yet.” I kissed the spot just above his groin, and he rolled his hips to press his cock against the side of my face. “Keep still, Athos.”

My hair spilled over his stomach and groin as I licked a long path down his thigh, the inside of his leg, and then thrust my tongue into the pit behind his knee. Athos jolted up and fell back down with a groan, tugging against the bonds that kept him in place. He put up a valiant struggle, like the warrior of yore, as he hooked his leg around me instead, pulling me in, until I had to punish him for impatience by grabbing his foot and biting into the soft flesh beneath its arch. He moaned, his leg jerked back, and his thighs fell open again. Determined to throw me off, my clever godling changed his tactics: he slanted his hips, presenting himself to me, open to my gaze and my mouth which travelled slowly back up his legs, savouring the taste of his skin. But I persevered, quite undeterred, albeit not entirely unmoved. At long last, I pressed one last kiss to the inside of his thigh and pushed my face between his legs, nuzzling and lapping his testicles until the stream of disjointed words that he ground out dried up and he lay there, panting and shuddering under the slow, moist ministrations of my tongue.

I brushed another warm breath over his swollen prick and hauled myself above him. “I will untie one of your arms now,” I whispered hotly into his ear. “But only if you promise you’ll be a good godling and don’t attempt to escape.” I bit into his earlobe and he groaned. “ _Promise_ , Athos.”

“I promise,” he whispered, defeated. “Anything. Aramis.”

I kissed him in reward as I untied the knot of his bond and motioned him gently onto his front. “Are you comfortable?” I took his hand in mine and caressed his knuckles with my fingertips. “If you’ll promise not to let go,” I told him, wrapping his fingers around the bedpost, “I won’t tie you up again. Promise.” Athos sighed and I brushed his hair from his temple with my lips. “ _Promise._ ”

Another sigh, and then he shook his head. “No.” His fingers flexed beneath mine. “Tie me up, Aramis.”

My cock twitched and I pressed it into the gap between his legs, fucking myself in the tight space with short jolts of my hips. “As you wish, my love.” I fumbled with the rope and slung it around his wrist again. His shoulder, his arm flexed, his muscles bulged as he strained against the ties and gave himself over to them at the same time. My mouth was back at his neck, and I grazed his jugular vein with my fangs. Athos turned his head and arched his spine into me.

“Do it,” he breathed. “It’s yours.”

“Thank you.” I drilled two small holes into the side of his neck and caught the drops of blood with my tongue when they welled up. It wasn’t much, for I did not want to drain him; but my mouth was dry after I’d licked him from head to foot, and I needed his blood to revitalise my tongue. The rich liquid trickled from the pinprick wounds and I lapped it up. I dragged my tongue along the curve of his shoulder, painting burgundy lines on his marble skin. I licked them off again, slowly, relishing the way the rich flavour of his blood mingled with that of his skin and sweat. The wounds were sealing already, and all that remained were two small dots that marked him as mine.

The groove of his spine led me down to his loins. Athos spread his legs, splaying himself for me in wordless invitation. “ _Not yet._ ” He whimpered when I licked the dimples above the swell of his arse, ignoring the way he pulled in his knee to offer himself to me. “Wait for it.”

“ _Aramis!_ ” A pained groan, and Athos tugged at his bonds, rutting into the sheets, fucking himself into the mattress. I bit into the back of his thigh and he cried out. The back of his knee, soft and delicate under the gentle swipes of my tongue, and I had to hold him down with both hands. My fingers dug into his thighs, his hips, and then I slid my tongue through the cleft of his arse and Athos swore and sobbed into the pillow. He was opening for me under the gentlest touches of my tongue, spreading himself even further, pushing back with harsh jerks of his pelvis, and then I snaked my hand between his legs and closed my fingers around his cock.

“ _Not yet._ ” Inside my fist, his prick swelled painfully. I tightened my grip around the base and squeezed my tongue inside the tight hole that he proffered to me.

“ _I need to-_ ”

“ _Not. Yet._ ”

His skin glistened, his blood pumped frantically through his veins and muscles. The teasing licks were not enough. They set his flesh aflame, and he trembled and shivered under the gentlest whisper of breath, the softest touch of my lips and tongue.

By the time I came up again, he lay helpless and panting, no longer fighting against his restraints. I dragged my cock through the cleft of his arse, then further up, and pressed it into the small of his back. I stretched out atop him, exploring the curves and ridges of his ribs with my fingers, caressing their contours with my mouth, all the way up into his armpit and the length of his arm to his wrist. I yanked at the rope with my teeth. His blindfold had slipped and I pulled it off. Athos opened his eyes. Their gaze was unfocused, his face flushed and his hair drenched with sweat. My heart stopped, and when it restarted, it beat in time with his.

“I love you,” I whispered, pressing my mouth to his parted, panting lips in a ravenous kiss. He tried to say something, but all that escaped him was a half-choked moan, torn from the depth of his throat. I was already untying the bonds with quick fingers. “Come here.” I helped him roll on his back, and he melted into me, dissolving into my touch, more beautiful than ever in his helpless abandon.

“Don’t. Go.” His hand was groping for me, for I slid down his body again.

“I’m here.” I caught his hand and kissed his palm. And then, I licked along the full length of his cock, all the way up from his balls to the silky tip. It was salty and hot under my tongue, and I lapped at it again, caressing the throbbing vein with my lips. Athos’ hand alighted on my hair, holding fast to me rather than guiding, and his thighs shuddered around me. I pushed my hand between them, beneath him, and shoved two fingers inside him, sucking his cock in at the same moment. The blood in his veins heaved, ready to burst forth at the merest pressure. Its call was irresistible. I kept my hand still. I withdrew my mouth. I clamped it to the inside of his thigh. Under the pressure of my jaws and teeth, his skin broke and blood gushed into my mouth. Athos cried out. My fingers were trapped in a vise grip as his body clenched around them and his climax forced his seed out in long spurts.

Inside my mouth, the nectar of his blood churned and boiled, drowning out my senses until all I was left with was the flavour of his blood, suffused with arousal so potent it made my head spin and knocked the air out of my lungs. I hovered, helpless, suspended between my lust and his, and then Athos yanked my head up by my hair, heedless of the blood that still surged from the wound. “Come here.”

My fingers buried deep inside him, I crawled up his body, licking his blood off my lips, and then he pulled me down and kissed me. He ran his hand down his own torso, gathering up his seed, and then he pressed his fingers into my mouth. “Taste it,” he murmured, coating my bloodied tongue with yet another layer of divine essence. My cock twitched against the bleeding wound that burned with divine energy as his skin slowly closed and his veins replenished themselves, endlessly, eternally. Then, his hand on me. I fucked myself into its heat, and he pulled my orgasm out of me with a few sure strokes. We lay gasping, throbbing with one heartbeat, sliding against each other’s slippery skin. His hand around my cock; my hand between his legs, and then his voice, rough with the exhaustion of ecstasy. “I’m filthy.”

I choked out a laugh. “Yes.”

“Lick me clean?”

His heart thudded beneath my ear. My lips skidded over the ridge of his collarbone. “Anytime,” I murmured, even as Hypnos was vanquishing us both. Athos’ stomach twitched with a short, soundless burst of laughter.

“Insatiable.” I felt his voice reverberate through his bones into mine. My tongue had turned wooden inside my mouth, my lips were glued together, and a mist was a-swirl in my mind, pulling me down and down into the vortex of dreamless sleep.


	6. Joyride

**London, November 1648**

The November rain was so cold, it seeped through your skin, right into your bones, and no amount of stoked fire could make you feel quite dry enough.

“England was better in 1615,” I grumbled, sitting on the windowsill. “At least back then, the Globe was opened. You could have a decent Shakespeare comedy to warm up a perfectly miserable English day. It was almost fun.”

“You hated it,” Aramis nibbled on my earlobe, draped across my back with his arms crossed over my chest, like an expensive shawl. “You thought the ale tasted like piss and London made you so angry that you spent the next decade wanting to stab an Englishman.”

“Well, it was still better than _this_ ,” I gestured out the window and added, “Fucking _Puritans_.”

“Impossible,” he purred. “I’m here now. This must be better.” His face rubbed against the back of my neck, the stubble of his poorly shaven jaw scraping against my skin. 

“Aramis…” I craned my neck back and let my skull rest in between his collarbones. His lips pressed against my forehead.

“I’ll make you warm,” he whispered.

I moved away from the window and turned over onto the bed, arching my back into his touch, into the feel of his mouth slowly trailing over each vertebra.

“Wait,” he sighed against my skin, “like this. I want to see you.”

His strong arms manhandled me into his lap, and I sat astride him, hands pressed against his heaving chest.

“What would you like to see?” I asked, rocking back against his cock, which rose up rigid and flushed behind me. His thighs and knees knocked into my back and he pushed me backwards, his eyes scanning me from face to my own engorged cock, which rose and pointed at him accusingly. _There lies the cause of all my predicaments_ , it seemed to say.

“Your face,” he whispered, his hand trailing up to rub along my jaw as he spoke. “While I fuck into you.”

I flushed and turned my eyes away from his gaze, which seemed to tear down something inside me. 

“Not like this,” I protested weakly. We had never done it this way. It seemed… it felt… so vulnerable. I was hard pressed to explain why. It was one thing to allow him free reign over my body, for I always found submitting to his will to be an exceptionally liberating feeling, but it was another for him to ask me to take active control of my own buggery.

“Yes, like this,” he insisted, his thumbs pressing into the dips of my hipbones. “I want to watch you ride me. I want to see you take it.”

“Aramis…” I whimpered and leaned over him, hiding my face in the crook of his neck.

“I want to see you love it,” he breathed into my ear as both his hands alighted on my ass and spread me apart. “You do love it, don’t you, Athos?”

I was not accustomed to being the one being talked to this way, and I felt a shiver run up my spine from where his thumbs rested against my sacrum.

“Come, my beautiful godling,” he mouthed at the side of my neck. “Let me see you.”

I rose over him, looking down onto his prone body again. You would think from that position, I would feel a surge of power, instead I felt exposed and I swallowed against the strange fear that sat in my throat. Odysseus wasn’t there to judge me, but suddenly I felt all the eyes of Olympus upon me.

“I love you so much,” he whispered, his hands running up and down my sides as if trying to soothe an agitated animal. “Please, let me watch you.” I trembled and arched back again, grinding my hips against his loins. “Please, my love.” He pressed the jar of oil into my hand and I worked myself open, as he watched, eyes clouded with lust. “Oh fuck, Athos!” I shut my own eyes, feeling only my own fingers stretching me, and his hands running over my trembling thighs. “I want to be inside you so badly,” he said.

“Where did you learn to speak to me this way?” I smiled and reached back, to position his cock against my entrance.

“I learned from the best,” he grinned, his fangs flashing in his mouth, like diamonds. “Look at me,” his nails dug into the flesh of my thighs as I sank over him, feeling him stretch me to the brim. “ _Look at me_ ,” he repeated more firmly and my eyes flew open along with my lips as I moaned in ecstasy. “Yes, right there,” he moved underneath me, fucking up into the heat of me as I clenched down over his throbbing cock. 

I rocked against him, meeting his eyes and seeing my own lust reflected back at me. His body trembled between my thighs and I rose and fell over his cock with mounting abandon.

“Aramis,” I sighed as his hand grasped my cock, tugging it in time with each thrust that I forced into myself, rising and falling over and over again, until my thighs began to burn.

“So beautiful like this, Athos,” his fingers traced the droplets of sweat that ran down my neck. He let go of my cock and rose himself up on his elbows, wrapping one arm around me to hold me close while I drove my cock into the heat trapped between our bodies. “Yes, ride me,” he mouthed into my neck, “just like that.”

I moaned, I trembled, I sank my nails into the flesh beneath his shoulder blades, like flittermouse wings pulsating under my hands. Again, I wanted to avert my face from his penetrating gaze, but he held me back by the hair and watched me fall apart, as if he wanted to drink in each whimper, each flutter of my eyelashes.

“ _My god_ , I adore you,” he told me, hand gripping my cock tight just as I clamped down over him and cried out in ecstasy, spilling all over his pumping fist.

My head swam, my body swelled up and went limp, and he flipped me onto my back like a ragdoll, fucking into me with a few more swift and powerful thrusts until I felt him explode inside me, and I held him tightly against me while the spasms wracked his body. His fangs grazed over the exposed tendons of my neck and retracted without breaking skin and then his lips pried mine open. He had decided that he had taken enough from me, it seemed.

“I would give you all my own blood if I could,” he whispered into my mouth.

“You give me more than that,” I replied and held him close. In the distance, I could still hear the pitter-pattering of the rain against the sodden windowpane.


	7. Disguise

**London, December 1648**

I pulled the hood of my cloak over my face and slithered into the shadows of the narrow alley. The crisp air prickled on my skin and I shoved my hands deeper into my muff.

The Tyburn Tree loomed in the middle of the roadway, and from it dangled a black-clad figure that had been a priest not long ago. Now, it was a body that would decorate the gallows for the amusement and edification of the plebs and for the greater glory of god (though which god I found impossible to tell), while the soul would one day soon be elevated to that of a Catholic martyr.

This was not a setting where I could move around freely in my usual costume. The monk’s habit, the Jesuit cassock, which had served me well for many centuries, had become a hazard. For the first time in my life, I found myself on the other side of religious persecution. I could not come to this place in my dress of a cavalier, either, and the only other option-

“You will have to cut your hair, little chyortik,” Athos had smirked from the bed, watching me pace the room as I read a note that had fallen into my hands by accident. Don’t ask what it said nor whence it had come, for these are details that bear no relevance to the present narrative. All you need to know that a clandestine rendez-vous had been fixed that I had to attend in disguise.

“You will never pass for a Puritan with your long, luscious locks,” Athos had continued. “What will you do, my infernal Narcissus, bedevil everyone who passes you in the street?”

My hand had moved of its own accord and touched my hair, fingers a-tremble.

The same fingers that now stuck deep in the muff, curled around a crude little billet that had been handed to me in passing. Even though I did not read it here, I knew that what it had to say would put an end to Athos’ and mine sojourn in London. The king, whom we had come to save, was still in danger. The king’s Catholic wife was in Paris. But she had friends in London still, who, ferreting for allies, had sniffed out Athos and me in our sanctuary.

“There is one other way.” Lounging on the bed in a pose of utter dissolution, Athos had raised his wineglass to his mouth, drank, and licked his lips. “You will be able to don a costume _and_ keep your beautiful locks.”

After a short (yet fierce) tumble, Grimaud had been summoned, Grimaud had been despatched on an errand, Grimaud had returned, Grimaud had grumbled and rolled his eyes in Olympian disapproval, and Grimaud had slunk off.

“Is this really our plan?” I’d held voluminous fabrics aloft with both my hands and Athos had raised his eyebrows with a filthy grin.

It was, apparently. This is how it came that I was now weaving my way back to the Bedford Tavern and up the stairs to our room in a get-up that was-

“Beautiful.” Athos opened the door and stood, gazing at me with that dark-eyed expression that rendered my knees weak. He hooked an arm around my waist and pulled me inside. “Mmh,” he murmured against my cheek, pushing off my hood with his free hand and undoing the clasp of my cloak. “Your waist is scrumptious in this costume, my angel.”

“Athos-” I said, curling my lip in a sneer.

He laughed and kissed me on the mouth. “Don’t pout, sweetheart,” he whispered and probed the tip of my fangs with his tongue. “You’re a fierce one, aren’t you?”

Despite my better judgement, I was getting into the spirit of things. My body had already demonstrated interest, my cock throbbed against the layers of my petticoats. “You like them spirited, is this what you were going to say?” I freed one hand from the muff and curled my fingers around his throat, forcing his head away so that I could look at him.

His lips were parted, his eyes dark with desire. His gaze dropped to my mouth and he licked his lips. “Spunky,” he whispered, his hand burrowing under the layers of fabric that enclosed me.

“You know your way around a lady’s garments well,” I said. “For a sodomite.”

“You’d be surprised,” Athos conceded. “One thing I know is that a real lady would not wear these.” He tugged at my breeches. “What if someone had, _ah_ , searched you?”

“A pair of pantaloons would have been the least of their worries, had they searched beneath my petticoats.” I jutted my hips forward to rub the offending object demonstratively against his hand. “And it’s freezing cold out there.”

“I’ll warm you,” he whispered. In the next moment, my cloak slid to the floor with a hiss, I found myself clamped in the vice grip of his hands, and he was lifting me up, dragging me across the room (rather ungainly perhaps, for delicate though I was, my body was heavier than that of a woman), and then he flung me on the bed in a heap of fabrics and fur.

“I believe your hair has come undone.” Athos loomed over me, fingers moving deftly through my tresses that Grimaud had so artfully (albeit grudgingly) arranged. He began to pull out the pins.

“I’m impressed.” I shifted beneath him, spreading my legs as far as the heavy wool permitted. “The nymph taught you well.”

“The nymph taught you too, did she not?” Athos ducked his head and licked a long stripe up my throat that he had laid bare. “How to lace your bodice…” He tugged at the laces with his teeth as he spoke. “How to tighten your corset…”

“Athos,” I groaned, for his hand had found my bare flesh at last as he pulled my breeches down my legs. He came back up, grabbed my muff and tossed it to the floor. “There’s a note in there-”

“We’ll read it later.” He was nuzzling my neck in a reversal of our roles, sucking and nibbling as if he wished to devour me. “For now, I have a lovely strumpet to attend to.” Working his way up my jaw, he arrived at the corner of my mouth and licked across my lips. “So soft,” he sighed. “I haven’t kissed you so clean-shaven since-”

“Krakow.”

“Krakow.” Athos smiled. He reached for the jar of oil and dipped his fingers in deeply. In the next moment, his hand was snaking up between my legs and I groaned as one slick finger breached me in one confident stroke. His other hand lay on my stomach, pressing down on me as I lay immobilised through my corset, my petticoats and the steady, firm motion of the hand that was screwing itself into me.

“Turn over,” Athos whispered in Russian. “Sweet diablik mine.” He pulled back to give me enough space, and I heard the rustling of his clothes as he liberated his swollen cock from its confines. My skin shivered, my muscles trembled, as he pushed the petticoats up my thighs until they lay bunched around my hips. “So beautiful.” A soft sigh, barely more than an exhale, and then a cool breath of air against my taut skin. The pressure of his mouth, his tongue darting out to lick me, to push me open for his cock, and then further down and he sucked in my balls greedily, one after the other. His finger slipped in again, then another one, and Athos was fucking them against that spot inside me that made my vision go black.

I thrust my hips into the mattress with a pathetic whimper, balancing at the brink of climax. But he would not grant it to me so easily. The fingers withdrew, and then there it was – his thick cock was forcing me apart, squeezing itself through the ring of muscles that clenched around it. “Relax,” Athos murmured, caressing my back with long, firm strokes. “It doesn’t hurt, does it?”

“I’m so close,” I almost sobbed, gritting my teeth and clutching fistfuls of sheets in my hands, for my cock had swollen beneath me and throbbed against my stomach.

“Shh, it’s all right.” Athos’ hand on my hip, motioning me to slant my pelvis for him. “Not much longer. You can take it, Aramis.” Then, a grunt, a gasp, and the slap of flesh on flesh as he buried himself all the way inside and stilled, balls-deep in my arse.

My knees scraped across the floor, my cock burned as heat drained from my hands and feet and surged into my groin, and Athos drove into me again and again. “Now,” I panted. “Your hand.” I raised myself off the mattress as far as I could, arching my back for him.

He groaned. “Oh, Aramis.” Fingers digging into the flesh of my arse, even as his other hand burrowed itself in my petticoats and he wrapped his fingers around my cock. That was all it took; my overcharged body spasmed and I spilled myself over his hand and into the linen. His hips slammed into me, and then he collapsed across my back. I felt his prick twitch inside me, pulsating against my tender flesh in time with his frantic heartbeat.

“We’ve ruined your dress,” Athos muttered eventually with his lips pressed against the nape of my neck. His softened cock had slipped out, and my thighs were slick with his release.

“It’s not my dress.”

“You should keep it. I can’t think of anyone who could wear it with as much aplomb as you.”

“D’Artagnan perhaps? I believe he once attempted to seduce you by dressing up as a harlot and paying you a visit in the dead of night.”

Athos laughed and we rolled in each other’s arms until we were face to face and he kissed me on the forehead. “Do you wish to discuss d’Artagnan while we’re in bed?”

“Never.” I shuddered. “I’m already regretting having mentioned him at all.” I shifted, for my corset was still laced rather too tightly and it was difficult to breathe. “What about that letter?”

“What letter?”

“The letter I went to fetch. The letter which was the sole reason for this entire masquerade.”

“Ah, that letter!” Athos looked around for my muff. “I confess I’d quite forgotten about it.”

“Why did you think I’m dressed like a lady then?”

He grinned filthily. “For a number of reasons…”

“Fie!” I cried out and slapped his arm. “Begone, evil seducer! Go and fetch me my billet.”

“Whatever my sweetheart wishes.” He took my hand and kissed it tenderly, and then he went to pick up the missive. “We know what it is anyway.”

“A call to arms,” I nodded. “I believe we will have to leave this sacred retreat and move north.”

“The king is in Newcastle. We will have to set off tomorrow.” He scrunched up the billet and tossed it into the fireplace.

“It is perhaps for the best.” I sighed and sat up in a nest of my bunched-up petticoats, casting a look around the room, where every soft surface (and several hard ones) bore the traces of our coupling. “I heard Grimaud complain we have run out of money. We’ve spent everything Porthos and d’Artagnan had sent us.”

“Something will come up. Grimaud is a genius with money. And if all else fails,” he sank down on the bed beside me and kissed my hand, “sweet chyortik can bedevil a nice man to sell us a pair of horses at a reasonable rate.”

“You are positively an evil genius, count.”

“You inspire me to great heights, d’Herblay.”


End file.
